Shake Away These Constant Days

"Each of the stories in Ryan Werner’s Shake Away These Constant Days ends with a sentence that’s a fist to the ribs. The collection builds into repeated shots to the soft part of your guts, a beautiful pummeling. By the end of Shake Away These Constant Days, you won’t even notice the bruises, the missing teeth, the pain. You’ll only want to go another round." - Sarah Rose Etter, author of Tongue Party

"Ryan Werner’s debut marks the arrival of an important new voice: quirky, world-wise, and as joyfully rambunctious as your favorite punk rock song. Listen up. You’ll be glad you did." -Tom Cooper, author of Phantasmagoriaand Barataria

Murmuration

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"The five stories in Ryan Werner's Murmuration, which are dedicated to the Midwest, bring me into the heart of a world where boys drive cars off cliffs and have least favorite strippers, where dreams must be revised into "necessary shapes" by playing guitar in the street at night. Ryan writes with authority, skill, and passion, not only about the Midwest, but about youth and what it means to be young." - Mary Miller author of Big World and Less Shiny

"The characters in Murmuration seek out not meaning but the feeling of being alive. This, to me, is what great fiction is concerned with. All ache is oblique ache. The alacrity with which the writer hurls bolts of narrative energy down upon the page is understated, subtle, devious, smartly crafted. Every car crash here betrays a more sinister phantom behind the wheel. Each story an icicle aimed at your eye, a bright bayonet of light, pre-dripping the poison of a writer just getting warmed up." - Matthew Burnside, author of Escapologies

If There's Any TruthIn a Northbound Train

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"'You have to want something all the time,' I tell him. 'It's just human.'—Werner’s book is full of characters wanting something all the time. It makes me want. It makes me want to read this book over and over. Hilarious, witty, ghostly: people and body parts go missing and sometimes reappear. But the Truth, dammit, is elusive and pervasive at the same time. How does he do it? It makes me squirm." -Amy Temple Harper, author of Cramped Uptown

"There is an apocalyptic fervor to these tales of missing friends, missing limbs and tightly held truths ripped violently away. Werner is a master of articulating the particularly Middle American malaise of his beloved miscreants and misanthropic castaways—his grocery store clerks and meat packers living an inch from oblivion. With predictably electric prose and a freewheeling vernacular that rings deadly true, Werner takes us on a heavy metal hell-ride through lives lived without a net—banzai skydivers staring down the end of days and taking another bite of their goddamned candied apple." - Aaron Teel, author of Shampoo Horns

Soft

E-mail me here to get a copy. $10 shipped, comes with freebies and some candy. (Or go to the Passenger Side Books page and check out some package deals.)﻿

"With the wit and heartbreak of Amy Hempel, the satirical eye of George Saunders, and the "we're on this earth to fart around" mentality of Kurt Vonnegut, the 258 micro-chapters of Ryan Werner's Soft tell the story of a failed rock band on tour. In sharp, spare, laugh-out-loud prose, Werner's misfit characters struggle to find their purpose in a world defined by alienation, death, and soul-sucking capitalism. These characters desire more from life, but are unsure what more looks like or how to get it. While they're figuring it out, they cope by trading clever one-liners, eating a lot of gas station food, obsessing over the world's extinction, and mailing koan-like postcards sacross the country. This is a small, smart book that asks the big questions about the age we're stuck in: What is the good life? Does it exist? How can we create authentic selves and art in a world that values neither?" - Megan Martin, author of Nevers